“Hey, why do the books cost what they do?”
It’s a pretty great question, and most surprisingly, one I never get asked. Usually it comes in the form of “Do you… make money out of this?” (to which I answer “you’re welcome to help right now!) and “When’s the movie happening!?” (to which I ask, rather pointedly, if their inquiring because they know someone who could make that happen.)
I supposed I’m writing this big old blog post as a big ol’ FAQ to address, en-masse, a lot of the questions I get when I show up to markets and conventions. This isn’t an action of spitefulness, bitter venting, or passive-aggressiveness, and isn’t intended as such, more a look behind the curtain as to how I make a few choices as an independent Australian author.
So, let’s start with how I pick a price. Things I need to take into account is obviously the cost it takes me to get the books printed, the stuff I have to do to get the book turned from a big messy word document and INTO a book, and then everything I do to sell the book.
Being an indie author means I need to front these costs myself. It feels crazy and scare at times, especially when I’m dropping a couple grand on books. The last time I made an order, it was for about 300 or so copies. Fun fact, that’s about 200 kilos of paper, if my mental maths is correct! So yeah, that’s my main ongoing cost of things. Can’t sell books if you don’t order them, right? I’m not going to share my exact numbers here, but I do want to talk about the options that indie authors have when sourcing their physical copies.
I get my books from a company called Ingram Spark. They’re a print-on-demand printer that’s a subsidiary of a larger company that produces a lot of the physical copies put out by big publishing houses. The benefits for me is that I can order as small a run as I like of my books, because I don’t want to drop tens of thousands of dollars on entire pallets of them just yet, and that they’re printed here in Australia. Because of the latter, I’m able to get into quite a few different markets which have a pre-requisite of an artist’s goods being produced in Australia.
Other options I have is to get them printed from Amazon, but I don’t prefer the quality of them over what I get from Ingram Spark, and I’m pretty leery the process of purchasing author copies from them, as their interface isn’t really set up for that kind of thing. There are other independent printers outside of Ingram Spark I could look at that are here in Australia, but as mentioned above, I’m not quite at the stage of ordering large enough quantities to make those worthwhile. But one day, hopefully.
The other option is to get them printed in China and have them shipped across to me. If ordered in bulk, It COULD drastically cut the production costs, yet then I’m facing down long shipping times, complicated international ordering processes and then it knocks me out of a lot of the in-person markets I currently rely on. Still, this is one of the reasons you end up seeing traditionally published books in bookshops going for sometimes less than half what I charge for mine. Those huge print runs they do can likely get the production costs per copy down to only a few dollars, maybe even under a dollar, depending on it.
Anyway, to close out this section, the other things that affect the price of a paperback is the length, and even the thickness of the paper. For me, my books tend to be a bit chunky because I’ve chosen purposely to have a larger font that the absolute minimum, and also that I allow for spacing between the lines. If I dialled that down as much as I could, then it would probably cut down the wholesale price I pay by a good couple dollars, but then they’d be pretty unpleasant to read, and I wouldn’t do that to ya.
Now, you ever wonder why things always come with a cost that ends in $0.99? It’s cause they don’t want to say the WHOLE number. $39.99 and $40 are VERY different numbers when you slap them on a price tag. While I don’t deal in cents any more myself, I still really want to avoid having something end in an easily comprehendible number unless its part of a bundle that I want to push people towards. It’s a lot harder to picture what $37 looks like than $35, which is a contrast I want to draw when I offer people that they can buy two books for $70, a nice, round number.
A lot of what I do at markets right now relies on selling these little bundles. It’s part of why the common advice is to make sure you have a couple books out before you go hard with marketing, advertising and in-person events. After all, if I’ve only got one book, the most money a person can give me is the price of that book. If they happen to be a returning customer, then they can’t give me anything else. These two things make it pretty impossible to cover costs, and there’s a fair few costs to cover!
Just about any in-person market I’m able to show up in will have a stall-holder fee. This is a cost paid to the organiser in exchange for a space to exhibit in and an opportunity to sell to the people who show up. Usually this is a couple hundred dollars, sometimes up to a grand, depending on the size of the market. And sure, it’s scary to start a day in the red, but for me, it’s still better than sinking the same amount of money into online ads which don’t return nearly as much.
As an aside, this is part of why I don’t really push e-books for the moment. It’s a whole lot of hassle with the added detriment of very costly trial and error. It returns a lot less per book, and I don’t even get to meet and talk to the person getting my books, so it’s harder to establish a connection with them.
For similar reasons, it’s why I’ve not done much of the leg work when it comes to reaching out to bookstores and getting copies of my books there. The margins are pretty narrow, there’s a lot of back and forth, and if they take the books on consignment rather than buying them wholesale, then I’m still wearing the cost of the books up until they sell, and likely for a while after until they pay me. Still, if you’re reading this and have something to do with a bookstore and want to stock my books, reach out! I’m not closed to the idea of being stocked, but right now I just haven’t got the energy to do the kind of outreach required.
Anyway, back to the markets. The stallholder fee is usually the least of the problems. The rest of it comes down to travel costs and accommodation! The grand tour I just completed for the Adelaide and Melbourne Oz-Comic Cons saw me cover over 3000 kilometres in 11 days, so I’m sure you can figure out that there was a bit of money spent to do that!
Was it worth it? I’ve got no idea right now, I haven’t been bothered to properly tally up all the expenses yet. I knew it was never going to be a huge money spinner compared to the costs, but it was an expedition in making new fans and having myself a little holiday in the middle of it all. I don’t think I could do it again as a huge road trip because of how exhausting it was, but I’m still slated to be back in Adelaide for SupaNova in November so I’ll have the experience of flying across then.
The last big cost, and this is the real big one for me, comes down to the production of the books, and because I’ve been pumping them out so fast, they’ve been really hard to keep up with. Cover art is expensive, and because I’ve been opting to commission full custom pieces of art that I get the full rights to, I’m really sparing no expense here, and I wouldn’t have it any other way, either.
The covers do a significant amount of the work for me at markets. Authors looking for more budget friendly options can usually pick up pre-made covers or get covers designed in a more cookie-cutter way for cheaper, but again, it’s not something I want to do. It works for some genres, but not mine, and not with what I’m doing. That’s one of the things I like about being independent, really. I’m certain that if I was picked up by a traditional publishing house from the start, I wouldn’t have had a single choice in what the cover was.
The next big costs after that is the editing. I go through a pretty extensive copy edit and then a proofread. Some authors also get a developmental edit done before all that, which is more about doing heavy works of the overall structure of the plot and the characters, but it’s something I don’t opt for because I feel I’ve got a pretty good handle on getting through that stage.
Some authors do all their own editing, but I made the call to bring in other people because they have fresh eyes on the book, and it also saves me a whole lot of time and hair-pulling energy of getting it done. Well worth the cost, in my opinion. Nothing sucks more than when someone points out a typo and you know you can’t change it because you’ve got 200 copies of the book with that exact typo already in your garage.
Anyway, I’ve forgotten a bit what the point of this all is. Maybe just saying that all this costs more than you expect to do, but it’s worth it. I appreciate everyone who’s supported me, and it fucken rocks that I get to meet them all. This last weekend I had about five different people come back just to talk about the books with me, and I gotta say, there’s no greater feeling than that.